Around college football: Kay passes Cincinnati to third straight win

Cincinnati 34, Memphis 21: Brendon Kay passed for 321 yards and a touchdown, and Cincinnati held host Memphis to 232 yards of offense last night.

Kay completed 27 of 35 passes to help Cincinnati (6-2, 3-1 American Athletic Conference) win its third straight game.

Anthony McClung finished with 98 yards receiving and a touchdown, and Shaq Washington had 11 catches for 96 yards.

Tion Green got two touchdowns, the final one from 3 yards with 1:26 remaining. Jordan Luallen and Ralph David Abernathy each had a rushing touchdown for the Bearcats.

Memphis’ Patrick Lynch completed 17 of 33 passes for 140 yards and two touchdowns, but the Tigers (1-6, 0-4) struggled on offense at key times.

ACC attendance down

It has been tough for Atlantic Coast Conference schools to fill their stadiums — even during one of the league’s best seasons on the field in years.

ACC stadiums have been less than 85 percent full this season, according to STATS LLC. That’s the smallest number since the league expanded in 2004, and that is despite having three teams ranked in the top 10.

“It takes a great fan to come to games now,” said Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe, whose team lost at Miami last week in front of thousands of vacant seats. “Everywhere we go, we see empty seats.”

Attendance in the ACC has been declining every year since 2007.

The ACC can expect a couple of sellouts with instate rivalry games this weekend: No. 3 Florida State play hosts to No. 7 Miami, and North Carolina visits N.C. State.

But those appear to be the exceptions to the trend of empty seats, which Grobe calls “kind of a national thing now.”

“There’s a lot of tickets sold now,” he said, “but I guess a lot of people stay in parking lots.”

Having so many games available on television makes it tough to attract big crowds to the stadium.

That is why Rick Steinbacher, North Carolina’s senior associate athletic director, said the challenge is to “try to make that in-stadium experience as unique and as special and as exciting as it can possibly be so it’s harder to choose to stay home than come to the game.”

“Give the fans something unique and make them feel part of something when they’re in the stadium in a way that you don’t when you’re at home,” he added.

Injury report

D.J. Humphries will miss Saturday’s game against Georgia and could be out for four weeks because of a knee injury. … Washington receiver Kasen Williams will be out for up to four months after surgery to repair a broken bone in his lower left leg and an injury to his foot. ... Wisconsin linebacker Chris Borland missed a second day of practice as he recovers from a strained right hamstring.